A friend of mine, a foreign correspondent who used to work for CNN, recently described to me a poster he saw in the back of a cab on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border: bin Laden riding a unicorn with a Kalashnikov in each hand while the Twin Towers explode behind him. Clearly the terrorists are winning the cultural dimension of the war; they know what kind of war movie they want to see, and we do not. At the same time that thirty thousand of the country's best young men and women will be deployed to the most desperate corner of the earth, we are surrounded by conflicting depictions of battle. Depending on what screen you're watching, war is either a virtuous struggle of good over evil (HBO's The Pacific), a moral (and literal) minefield (Matt Damon in Green Zone), or a thrilling nightmare (Oscar darling The Hurt Locker) and that's not even counting the daily screaming matches on Fox News and MSNBC. After eight long years of bloodshed, and who knows how many more to come, we're still not sure why we fight, and our understanding of war is only growing more blood-dimmed and confused.

David James/HBO

The Pacific comes from the same Spielberg-Hanks juggernaut that brought us that other ten-part miniseries about World War II, Band of Brothers, back before 9/11. To compare the two epics is to understand just how much has changed over the past decade. At the turn of the century, when Steven Spielberg revolutionized war cinema with his graphic depictions of the visceral and psychological carnage of battle in Saving Private Ryan, the audience had the stomach for realism. We were, after all, pretty much at peace at the time. But after years of random death and hollow victory, The Pacific's creators take a softer approach to the devastation of war. In the three episodes that I've seen, the music never stops swelling. The clichés never stop hitting you in the face. You know the first time you see a southerner that he's going to be called "Johnny Reb" by a northerner, and so he is. Anyone whose name ends with a vowel comes from a happy family in which all the women cook nothing but big elaborate meals. These are not soldiers; they are flower arrangements on the theme of soldiers.

Similarly, The Pacific isn't a war movie; it's a propaganda film about a war that's been over for sixty years. And God, we want to fight that war again, don't we? The enemy wore easily identifiable uniforms, with skulls on them and stuff. The conflict had a clear beginning, middle, and end, throughout which the U. S. was the ultimate hero. And after the war was all over, America taught the world the true meaning of victory, rebuilding its enemies with magnanimity, generosity, and wisdom. Who wouldn't rather watch that war than the nightly news?

Universal Pictures

And yet movie studios still insist on churning out films about our current dealings in Afghanistan and Iraq, despite the fact that no one is quite sure how these stories are going to end. (Even Vietnam, right in the middle of Hollywood's great countercultural awakening, didn't inspire great films like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Coming Home until well after the fall of Saigon.) Now joining the list of television shows and movies about the war on terror that nobody bothered to see is Green Zone, which goes like this: A warrant officer, stranded in the moral and material chaos of post-invasion Iraq, works against his own government, single-handedly laboring to discover the elusive weapons of mass destruction that would provide belated justification for the quagmire. It's crazy: We've come to expect soldiers to be morally superior to the mission they have been entrusted to execute. In pop culture right now, soldiers exist in an impossible space: part warrior, part saint, part victim.

The basic fact may be that Afghanistan and Iraq make for lousy movies. Unlike World War II, its happy endings and unimpeachable motives so well suited for celluloid, our ongoing struggles are happening in real time, with jarring visuals and Twitter-feed updates. In other words, they're more like video games. The greatest artwork made so far about the war on terror is a first-person-shooter game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, that broke sales records when it came out in November. I should add that while I admire this game enormously it might be the first protest game I don't enjoy playing it much. Controller in hand and eyes on the screen, I keep asking myself: Why am I here? Whom am I killing? Modeled closely on the experience of soldiers in Afghanistan, the game flashes quotations on the screen after you're killed that are even more disturbing. It quotes Confucius "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves" and Francis Bacon: "In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy, but in passing it over he is superior."

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The more you die, the less your dying makes sense, and it's no coincidence that the only satisfying war movie of late is The Hurt Locker, which is about as close to a video game as you can get without actually having a controller in your hand. Just like Call of Duty, the movie opens with a quote ("... war is a drug" Chris Hedges) and relies on a first-person point of view when navigating the war-torn terrain. If The Hurt Locker deserves to win Best Picture as some believe it does the victory will be a coup for gamers everywhere.

You can expect to see plenty more where The Hurt Locker came from. Movies (and video games) demand heroes, and the U. S. military has plenty of them: a million and a half men and women who have arrived in the middle of a shitstorm with an incomprehensible backstory and an uncertain ending. The secretary of defense, Robert Gates, says 2011 will be the beginning of disengagement in Afghanistan, not the end, and until the last man leaves Iraq and Afghanistan, this story can go pretty much anywhere.

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